By hit-rate I mean number of crap tracks you listen to compared to ones you actually like. I’m trying to figure out some process to reduce the amount of crap I listen to. It gets really boring listening to one bad track after another to find the ones I want.
My process at the moment is to ‘favourite’ in beatport or juno producers I like and listen to their new tunes when they come out. To find new producers I use soundcloud to see what people with similar musical taste to me are listening to. I also favourite labels and listen to new releases. That is where most of the poor tunes I listen to come from. Even a label I think is pretty high quality tend to put out a lot of stuff that I don’t like.
get good at recognizing what you like and dislike about productions so that you don’t spend more than 5-10 seconds on stinkers.
it shouldn’t take any longer than that to recognize if the song is one that might be interesting to you. genre preferences, production style, mix/master enginearing quality are all evident within the first few seconds.
follow labels run by producers i like, no big ones. but yeah, manly 1-3 secs per track around the middle of the song, if it doesnt hook me with that then it’s gone.
My hit-rate is pretty atrocious compared to when I was on Vinyl, but…whatever. When Beatport alone releases like 50 pages/day and I have multiple genres to browse, it gets hard. I just jump through things quickly in the top-100 and some DJ’s lists…jump through the pages and pages of crap. If a track doesn’t grab me within 2 seconds, I’m not going to listen to the rest of it…the only tracks that 2-second rule doesn’t count for is if I’m familiar with the Artist or (less frequently) the label or when the track was recommended by someone (IRL or Online…not in a top10) who’s taste I know and trust.
Then, I move everything from my crate into my hold bin and use beatbot on the ones that don’t suck…usually that finds one or two tracks…and remove the ones that do…wait 24 hours and go back to it and see what I want to consider…with a 10-second cutoff including jumping around.
It’s my 3rd pass before I actually listen to the full sample of the song.
I also avoid artist albums like the plague, because they almost always suck…if an artist album comes out and a song or two doesn’t suck, it’ll be in the top-100.
I purposefully try to ignore what labels my tracks are on. If I can remember a label 2-3 days later while trying to forget it, it means there are enough of their tracks that I like that I can start thinking about maybe looking into their back catalog…same with artists.
For Techno artists (just an example–just finished a techno set), I remember Umek, Slam, Fergie, Pole Folder, Faithless, Cirez D, Marco Bailey, and, well…that’s about it. For Techno labels, I remember 1605 (because it’s the model of a Urei mixer I liked) and Bedrock…and, umm…that might be it. I own a lot more tracks than those artists and Labels. By purposefully ignoring things like that, I’m more confident in listening to something produced, remixed, or released by an artist or label that I remember.
Unfortunately, this is something you just have to live with. The problem with minimising the time it takes to find good tracks, is that you’ll also MISS a lot of great tracks.
Digging has ALWAYS been one of the most important parts of being a great DJ.
As has been stated before - less crap was released when it was vinyl only, so your ratio was way higher. (Record shops only stocked songs that would sell (ie - good songs) because there was a COST associated with holding stock.
Beatport can afford to stock every kind of crap, and they do - because no matter how shit a tune is, there’s always someone out there that will buy it. There is very little (if any) cost associated with stocking an electronic/.mp3 releases on BP. So BP DO stock all kinds of crap. They can’t lose. If the track sells, they get paid, if it doesn’t, they haven’t lost anything.
Digging will be (and always has been) what makes a good DJ a great DJ.
There is a nonzero cost for storing crap, but when the catalog’s that big…the cost for each song on their servers is very minimal. The bigger cost is in the bandwidth they have to pay for when people download songs…which the price has to more than pay for…hence why wavs cost more.
Most of my discovery of tracks comes from listening to mixes pretty much all day, which makes things pretty convenient. As for hunting on beatport/blogs/etc I typically find I have the exact opposite of finding too many tracks that I can use, as it only takes a few seconds for me to know if a song is bunk and I’ve never really considered it a hassle.
so do you find beatbot pretty effective? i haven’t used it much. i find it hard to believe an algorithm could find similar sounding tracks but i’m open minded.
i also do the thing where unless i’m really sure i’ll leave a track for a day or two and come back to it. sometimes if you’re in the ‘wrong’ mood a track can sound good even when it really isn’t. alcohol may be a confounding variable here
really good to know i’m not the only person that listens to tracks for a couple of seconds before giving them the flick. it is true that once you really know your own taste you can give tunes the flick really quickly.
agree that digging is an essential part of being a dj. but also think that doing everything you can to maximise good tuneage is important.
although digital revolution means there is a lot more crap to wade through, it also means we have more tools at our disposal to filter out the bad stuff. e.g. favourite producer lists and alerts when they release a new tune. it goes both ways. one of my mates is designing a program that automatically downloads samples of all the new tracks off beatport and junodownload and you will be able to set up filters etc. so much more powerful than the filtering systems that those websites have built in.
he also thinks dj’s like desyn have custom software that enables them to scan through thousands of tunes quickly so he can pick out the best ones and have stuff noone else does.
I just started using beatbot. I’ve found a few tracks using it. The good thing is it never returns more than two pages of tracks so I can get through them pretty quick.
